


Wandering: Being the Fifth Tale of the Coin, the Sword and the Medallion

by LooNEY_DAC



Series: The Coin [5]
Category: Original Work
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-16
Updated: 2018-05-21
Packaged: 2018-10-05 21:42:20
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 8
Words: 6,325
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10317578
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LooNEY_DAC/pseuds/LooNEY_DAC





	1. I: A Discussion of Entropy

OK, so this is where I would usually write down all the boring and mundane stuff that immediately preceded my latest trip to the Realm, because, let’s face it, my life is fairly mundane and boring; stuff like my latest vacation, which, while fun, couldn’t be considered earth-shatteringly important or anything, or that I was visiting Uncle Fixit and why; all that little stuff that makes up a fairly ordinary life. Well, that won’t happen this time.

Why won’t it happen? That’s simple enough: the lead-up to my latest trip to the Realm was the single weirdest experience of my life thus far, including my other-worldly adventures and mystical travels. Let that sink in for a moment, please. In the last six months, I’ve: been held semi-captive in a techno-cave out of Doctor Frankenstein’s happiest dreams in order to watch my future as predicted by one of the machines; traveled several times into another world via a “magic” Coin; fought a Magician there (twice!); both rescued and guarded a princess; fended off carnivorous sporks and annoyed sheep; and been turned into a fluffy bunny; and yet, and YET, this was weirder than any of those things, or even all of them put together.

In fact, I'm not even sure how to set it down here. I guess I'll just do what I always do: set down everything I saw and heard as best I understood it. As best I can recall, it started thus:

I was asleep and dreaming, and I knew it. In this dream, I was walking down an unfamiliar street in some grimy industrial area in the dead of night. I knew where I was going, a plastics factory called Joe's Rubber Alligator Farm, and I knew that if I kept down this street and took a left, a right and a left I would get there. To get in, I would have to do two cartwheels, a somersault and five jumping jacks while reciting the Gettysburg Address. Oh, and I was wearing a wetsuit.

Now, none of what I've described is terribly unusual for a dream, but as I walked along the dark street bounded on either side by chain-link fence topped by razor wire, a purple penguin came alongside me. His name was Bob, and he had been in several other dreams of mine.

"Hey, Bob," I greeted him. Bob was nice; when he was in a dream, the dream never turned to nightmare, unlike so many others.

"Hey, dude," he replied with a wave of a flipper, then doing one of those characteristically avian full-body shivers as he strolled along beside me. "I've got a message for you."

"Oh?" I asked, with the mild interest of a dreamer. "What is it?"

"You need to wake up." Bob clapped his beak closed loudly after telling me this, a sign that he was serious.

"But I'm still tired," I protested. I have never in my life awakened without some form of protest.

"Dude," he told me, "you need to wake up now, or the train might run you down."

I shook my head, and was suddenly and completely awake, but I was still on the dark, deserted street, standing on a set of railroad tracks. I looked down them and saw a light slowly approaching me. With a startled yelp, I leapt off the tracks, almost tripping in my haste to get out of danger. Once, I had the misfortune of witnessing a man in the process of being hit by a train, and the experience had decided me against lingering on any tracks I chanced to come upon. “Thanks, Bob,” I muttered to myself as the slow-moving cargo train passed over where I’d been standing moments before.

"Most acrobatic, young man." The speaker, apparently materializing from nowhere to stand on the opposite side of me from the still-passing train, was dressed as the Invisible Man might for an evening out: full tuxedo, top hat, bandage-swathed face and dark glasses. His voice was hoarse and coarse, not unlike the bark of a seal. "Can you take dictation, as well?"

I nodded, blinking in surprise at his question. I knew that I was awake, but it felt like I was still dreaming.

"Then I shall relate a tale to you." He handed me a steno pad and pencil. "Take this down, leaving nothing out."

I waited for him to tell me of his travels through the Eighth Dimension with the aid of his spirit guide Thoth, or some other such insanity, but instead he asked me a question. "Do you know what entropy is, young man?" He then motioned that I should write down both his question and my forthcoming answer.

"I know what I think it is," I replied cautiously, "but I'm not at all sure what you mean by it."

"A wise answer, young one. Very wise. I begin to see-- But that is of no moment. As I shall use it, entropy is the gradual loss of energy from a system caused by inefficiency. Because of entropy, sooner or later more energy must be applied to the system, or its activity will cease."

"What about systems that are constantly receiving energy?" I queried, my brow furrowing.

"Those seemingly open systems become closed once you step back a bit, and very few things are truly constant. As energy is lost, the system itself may begin to collapse. Or, it may change with the changing energy budget, in seemingly random ways." He leaned in closer. "Of course, it isn't random, any more than the multiplication table, but that's another story as well. For now, the greater applications of my definition of entropy mean: things wear out; people need food and sleep; even stars eventually burn out. Entropy is a solemn and somber concept, but it can be forestalled. Fires can be restarted; prune a plant and it will flourish anew. Mark this well, young man."

He went on to say many other similar things, always coming back to the idea of renewing a system laden with entropy. I won't put them down here; I'd get bored. I will mention bits that became important when they became important, though.

"Ring around the rosie/pockets full of posies/Ashes, ashes/We all fall down!" The odd interruption came from an old woman who looked very reminiscent of an elderly Eliza Doolittle, if Eliza had had purple polka dots all over her dead white face. There was something familiar about that look of hers, though…

She looked like she was about to repeat the whole thing for us when someone behind her forced a gag into her mouth, pulling her back into the darkness. "Thank you, Fred," the man called, grabbing my shoulder to keep me at his side. "Now, where we? Oh, yes." And he spoke on.

Eventually, he rattled to a stop. With a final glance around, he bid me close the steno pad.

"I was never here; neither were you." He reached into his pocket. "Here," he said, pulling something out, "for your services, have--A COIN!" He flung the Coin at me and literally vanished.

I caught the flying disc in mid-air and looked at it curiously in the dim yellow-orange of the streetlights; it was indeed the Coin, my gateway to the Realm. Without another thought, I hunkered down and set the Coin a-spinning.

TO BE CONTINUED


	2. II: To Wrack and to Ruin

After what had just happened, I should have been ready for anything. Indeed, I thought I was, but as soon as the mists cleared, I knew I'd been wrong.

The scene before me was graphic enough that I shall only minimally describe it, though even that may be too much. Directly before me hung what had been a man, when it was still alive, which had not been for some time, though not long enough for it to be a skeleton. The sight was not one that I would willingly see again, unless at utmost need. Needless to say, it took me a few moments to regain my composure, but fortunately, there were obviously no foes in the area. I don't know whether I made any noise or not; if I did scream, I had due cause. Eventually, though, I began to look around.

I was in the burnt-out shell of a small building, which at first I thought had happened quite recently, until I looked more closely. A thick enough layer of dust covered everything that, despite the utter lack of fungal or vegetable growth on the remnants, the fire must have been decades ago.

When I came out from the forlorn shell entombing its grisly remains, I found the reason there had been so little decay: the whole area was barren of life, at least until stone walls blocked my view on every side. The walls were crude looking at this distance, but undoubtedly high and strong enough.

More corpses littered the foreground, all arranged in weird and esoteric ways, arcane and hideous writings in blood forming demonic figures around them. My mind went back to those images I'd been shown by the First Protector in Uncle Fixit's Garage less than a week before, and I knew those vicious fiends that I had dubbed “the Scowrers” were responsible for this panoply of gore. This would not go unavenged, I vowed silently.

At this point, and most anticlimactically, I sneezed. I seem to have omitted so far that I was fighting off a fairly mild case of the flu, so I was, in my mother's favorite idiom, "stuffed to the gills", which I knew wouldn't help were I to have need to try to intimidate someone; "Hea be dow, oh I shall dot be respodibul foh deh codsequesses" is not the most potent of threats.

Nevertheless, I was resolved to find those responsible for these outrages and bring them to justice, and the first step in doing that was to examine the writings. Unfortunately, nothing in them said, “I, Helmuth Man-Killer, did this and laughed all the while”, or anything like that, so I would have to continue my search elsewhere. This, of course, meant finding an opening in the wall.

A long and painstaking search proved that, oddly enough, the walls had no openings of any kind; further search showed that whoever had perpetrated the slaughter had rappelled from the top and used the line to climb back up once they were finished. But why build a wall with no gates in the first place?

The mystery deepened when I finally managed to scramble atop the Cyclopean structure. All the defensive structures (battlements, arrow loupes, and so forth) faced inwards, whereas normally such things would face outwards, whence an attack was expected. The unexpected inversion told me that this wall was originally meant to seal what the area it surrounded held away forever, and against a determined attacker, but what could have instilled such fear into these cruel Scowrers? Would I come across it, or did the abandonment of the fortifications mean it was no more? Should I find it, would it prove friend or foe? And where was I, anyway?

With these questions buzzing in my mind, I descended to the other side of the wall…

TO BE CONTINUED


	3. III: Desolation

I was facing what had been a forest, but was now barren of leaves. Not that it had been reduced to stumps or even trunks; most of the trees still had most of their branches; only the leaves were gone, by and large. Even without their canopies, however, the trees had no underbrush at their bases: the ground was as bare as the branches were.

Still, the corpse of the copse was sufficiently dense to block my view after a few yards, so I cautiously made my way along an ancient path that led ever deeper into the trees. It was uncomfortably like walking through a long-abandoned graveyard in the dead of night. Somehow, I was certain that I was being watched, though the only sounds I could hear were those I myself made.

Surrounded by desolation as I was, you can be sure the Invisible Man’s discourse on entropy was echoing in my ears the entire time. He’d stressed again and again the potential for renewal, but the view around me seemed to belie even the faintest hope of that.

As I walked the path, a nasty feeling of familiarity came over me, not unlike the one that I'd felt on seeing the erstwhile flower girl. Now, in a flash, I realized that the woman had terribly resembled a much older Dark Alamsta, the Witch I'd encountered in... in...

Oh.

Oh, my.

It was in this very wood that I'd encountered the Witch, a wood then green and vibrant, thriving and practically shouting with life. Looking around, I felt in my bones that all those adventures had taken place a very long time ago for this place, even though less than six months had passed for me since first I'd found the Coin.

Oh, boy.

That also meant that the burnt-out, walled in compound littered with corpses that I'd just left had actually been my usual arrival point, the Inn, or what was left of it.

Yikes.

I was already rather more than halfway down the path that led from inn to the Glade, so I hurried along, a sudden impatient curiosity demanding that I see the Tree again. The magnificent Tree, the centerpiece of the majestic Glade of Trial, loomed huge in my mind's eye. It had the answers to this conundrum.

On my way, I kept looking hopefully for any hint of the verdure of old in the greyish brown surrounding me, or any hint of the fauna that’d once been sheltered in it. Even the sporks would have been a relief, since this had been their home as well.

I was both wrong and right. When I reached the thick hedge that surrounded the Glade, it had grown solid through its former opening so that, had I not seen that magnificent archway and so known it had once been there, I never would have suspected there had ever been an opening in the tightly twined branches. But when I reached out to try to push them aside, the branches parted on their own, revealing a placard closely lined with odd writing. As I watched, the writing seemed to blur and shift into words I could understand and read.

The writing, as I saw it, read thus:

"In slumber deep this land doth lie,  
As weary ages long pass by,  
Until Protector Young doth rise,  
To cleanse the land in humble guise,  
Not by the sword but by the grippe,  
This land from foreign hold shall slip.  
Then shall all rise and take their place,  
Once Young Protector invokes Grace."

OK. So, we had a Sleeping Beauty situation here, or near enough, and I, as the Young Protector mentioned in the verse, was obviously supposed to trigger the return somehow, though the specifics seemed awfully... unspecific. This would require careful thought.

I suddenly knew what I needed to do: find the Medallion, and see to what use I might put it. Whatever had happened, and whatever the task that lay before me was, the Medallion, the symbol and weapon of my Protectorship, would undoubtedly ease my way to its completion. Not that it would magically accomplish everything for me; instead, it would shield and guide me as I accomplished the work myself.

I was about to set off for the Royal Palace, the last place I'd left the Medallion, when an obvious thought kicked my brain into operation. So why should the Palace be unspoiled when the rest of the Realm had been? I stopped short and quickly considered my options.

After a while, I remembered something else: when I'd first found the Medallion, I had been drawn to it. Perhaps something similar might happen now?

I shut my eyes and slowly turned a complete circle. Nothing happened, aside from my feeling both dizzy and stupid. So that hadn't worked. What should I do now?

The former forest had looked on as I tested my intuition, its aura of hostility giving way to one of simple watchfulness, as though it knew my efforts would eventually succeed.

"Baaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa."

...Or maybe it was just laughing at me, though on reflection it sounded more like the bleat of a sheep than a laugh.

"Baaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa."

I turned to face the source of the increasingly urgent noises, and saw...

TO BE CONTINUED


	4. A Flicker of Hope

"Baaaaaa," the ram bellowed again, before lowering his head to a sparse patch of bright green grass. The only such patch of green anywhere in view, it stood out like a signpost, the white fleece of the ram only adding to its conspicuousness; I could have sworn neither grass nor grazer had been there a moment before. The ram looked very familiar. In fact…

Astonishment held me immobile for a moment. It couldn't be; that ram must be dust long since, like Alamsta and all the others. This couldn't be the same ram that Alamsta had driven and I had striven with as she herded her father's flock.

After a moment, the ram shook its head and came over to me, and then it nudged me in the same way and in the same place as it had when it had broken me from the Witch of the Woods' illusion. OK, it was the same ram. No other ram would dare give me the "Hey, Stupid!" look this one reserved for me.

"Baaaaaaaaaaaaa." The ram sounded impatient, which was nothing new for it.

"Waaaaaaaah," I replied derisively. "I'm still trying to figure where the Medallion is, so unless you have some inside info on that, we're staying here until I'm done."

"Baaaaaaaaaaa," the ram said, kicking the turf with its left rear hoof. Clink.

I sighed, which inevitably turned into another coughing fit. "That's the Medallion, isn't it?" It wasn't really a question. I hunkered down and retrieved the Medallion, the ram still watching me mockingly.

"Baaaaaaa."

"Well, since you know everything already, where are we supposed to go now?" Cough, hack, hack.

The ram actually looked abashed (or, dare I say it, sheepish). I hadn't yet put the Medallion on, so I did. The usual slightly giddy feeling filled me, and then, I remembered. Or it seemed like I remembered; this whole Protector thing was still rather new to me, so I might have interpreted the experience differently than it actually was at the time.

Anyway, I seemed to remember (though very murkily, as though I had been under the influence of some sort of drug) the King, Alamanast the Twelfth himself, telling me of the ancient prophecies of the Long Sleep. Apparently, there would come a danger to the Realm which could not be forestalled or averted, so the people would retire to the Glade and enter the same sort of mass coma featured in the Sleeping Beauty story, only induced by the One rather than a fairy. OK; that seemed simple enough, but what was my part in this?

I sneezed again, loudly and wetly. I hate being sick. As I mopped myself up with my ever-ready handkerchief, more of the Plan was revealed to me. I was to go to where the Scowrers' despot made his habitation and deliver this message: leave, or die. After that, I should return to the Glade and assist the denizens of the Realm in recuperating from their long sleep.

It all seemed straightforward enough, but in the back of my mind I had a sneaking suspicion that it wouldn't unfold nearly so easily for me in actual fact. Well, at least I was just the messenger; hopefully, they wouldn’t shoot the messenger. Or do anything else in their, shall we say versatile repertoire.

"Baaaaa." The ram looked at me dubiously.

"Yeah, I know you’d rather be with your mistress." I blew my nose again and admitted, "Honestly, so would I. At least when she sasses me, it comes from another human instead of some stupid sheep." I took another breath, slowly trying to exhale without coughing my lungs up, and was mostly successful. "Well, let's go.”

The ram and I headed down the road towards the heart of enemy country...

TO BE CONTINUED


	5. Flu the Coop

Well, this had gone south in a big hurry. I sneezed half-a-dozen times into my sleeve, which was already sopping. Among the Scowrers’ cruelties great and petty was a reluctance to give me a handkerchief or two so that I could dry my nose and muffle my sneezes. Mine had given up the ghost on that some time ago, but that was shortly to become irrelevant, if the argument about stripping me naked that was currently raging went the way I suspected it would. Again, the Scowrers reveled in cruelties great and petty; humiliation was simply one more method to accomplish that.

I had been greeted with a vicious beating that, while strictly limited to soft tissue damage, still left me in considerable pain. The ram had escaped somewhere while my attention was occupied by the beating, so there was that in our favor. In any case, I was dragged across a corrugated floor and into the presence of a high muckety-muck the Scowrers referred to as “the Big Cheese”. Yeah, the shift from horror to parody was most trying for me; I think they didn’t put the clutch in quite far enough.

The Big Cheese was, of course, the same plug-ugly I’d seen passing judgment on the youths who had returned from killing and plundering: not in disapprobation of their heinous deeds, but in celebration of them, with the more heinous reaping more rewards. This might have colored my view of him, but the intense interest he took in the debate over how best to humiliate, torture and kill me was pretty off-putting in and of itself.

From a deep pocket of shadow behind the Big Cheese came a raspy voice at intervals, asking questions or prompting the Big Cheese to make declarations; it was therefore evident enough that the Big Cheese was simply a figurehead for the unseen speaker. My earlier scans of the camp from the safety of the Garage led me to surmise that the voice belonged to the twisted old crone who’d been passing judgment on the girls in similar fashion to the Big Cheese’s weighing of the boys.

I’m not given to ill-wishing, but I rather hoped the raspiness of the voice meant the speaker had throat cancer.

I sneezed again. This time, one of the guards ripped the sodden handkerchief away from me before I could even try to mop myself up again, getting his hands, which were already pretty disgusting, even more dirty. “You might want to wash up before you eat anything,” I suggested, and was kicked for my pains.

A few hours later, they had left me tied to a post after lashing me with a cane; again, for some reason I couldn’t fathom, they were careful to do only soft tissue damage, and only such as would leave no permanent marks. Anyone who thinks the beatings weren’t agonizing because of that is an idiot.

Regardless, they had left me alone after the guy caning me had started sneezing along with me, and even through my pain I was determined to take advantage of the opportunity thus presented to me. They had tied me to the pole as though I was giving it a bear hug, binding my wrists with a pretty sturdy leather thong. It took me maybe ten minutes to conclude that I wasn’t going to be able to wriggle my way free of the thong, and that I’d have to look elsewhere for my escape.

“Baaaaaaaaaa.”

OK: this time I had to be hallucinating. What were the odds of the ram having eluded capture for so long AND managing to find me in here at just the right time to get me free without risking capture itself?

Chomp, chomp, chomp.

On the other hand, I have never heard of a hallucination that affected the olfactory senses; your nose is usually the last sense you can fool in these situations. And hallucinations usually didn’t gnaw their way through physical objects, so the fact that my hands were freed within a few moments tended to confirm the reality of the ram.

“Should I start calling you King the Wonder Dog?” I asked the ram. When it looked at me in puzzlement, I sighed and said, “I take it you’re not a fan of _Sgt Preston of the Mounties,_ then. Well, let’s go.”

The ram and I made our way carefully through the labyrinth of fabric passageways that formed the Scowrer camp…

TO BE CONTINUED


	6. The Witching Hour

As the ram and I left the Scowrer encampment, we passed through what seemed to be some fancy nightclub light show, complete with weird stroboscopic effects, but without music. The wind kicked up so that we could hardly move all the while, but both light show and wind machine stopped just as abruptly as they had begun. Whatever that had been, it hadn’t been inimical magic, or the Medallion would have protected me at least, and probably the ram as well.

Since I could find no discernible cause for the weird effect and the desire to harm was obviously lacking, I decided to ignore what had passed in favor of pushing forward, hoping that there wouldn’t be a repeat of the wind to slow us down.

Before I knew it, a barely discernible cloud of white mist had risen off to one side of the narrow pathway the ram and I were headed down. “So, shall we try another round against each other, boy? Methinks this time ’twould be quite satisfying.” As it spoke, its shape mixed together and pulled apart, finally reforming into a nightmarishly thin man with the head, or more correctly the skull of a jackal. Obviously this was one of the three spooks I thought I’d dispatched on my first journey to the Realm; just as obviously, I had only banished the spooks at the time.

“Come, Fearblade! Come, Doomflail! On to the attack once more, fellow spooks!” At its cries, two more clouds in monstrous form pulled themselves out of the thin mist and started towards us with eldritch shrieks of wrath.

This time the Sword didn’t appear in my hand for the spooks to hurl themselves upon it; instead, the Medallion flared up as it had when warding me from evil sorcery, blazing once more with a light that drove the spooks back, with vile and foul curses the only things they could hurl my way.

I looked around apprehensively once the spooks had vanished. If this followed the same pattern as the last time I’d faced down the spooks, another attack was imminent. Last time I had had both Sword and Medallion, however spectral, to aid me; would the power of the Medallion alone suffice again?

Wolves howled, at first in the distance, but progressively louder. I’m still rather small for my age, though the ram was big and powerful, but a wolf pack could bring both of us down quickly and easily. The howling increased in volume until I could see the lights of their eyes reflecting the glowing Medallion, at which point they hung back around ten yards from us.

The rats were a bit bolder, when they appeared. They kept lunging forward from behind me, so I had to keep turning around in slow circles to hold them back. Even so, they weren’t the worst.

A huge mass of sporks appeared at the far end of the path. Again, these were insects maybe six inches long that bore an uncanny resemblance to that piece of cutlery for which they were named. They made giant nests like termites, and were essentially land piranha—I had seen a colony of moderate size take down a magnificent buck deer in just under twenty seconds when it blundered into their nest.

And then the War Witch made her appearance, leading a group of irregularly shambling figures that looked vaguely familiar up the path from the way the ram and I had come. “Going so soon?” She emitted a hacking cackle. “I see my allies have failed to finish you off, but as long as they’re holding you at bay, this group I bring shall suffice.”

The stench of death hung about the shambling figures even more strongly than the aura that pervaded the forest, and one good look at them was enough for me to confirm that these were indeed true zombies: corpses called forth from their graves to do their mistress' bidding by the apotheosis of unholy powers. In fact, I thought I recognized some as the corpses from the Inn. There certainly were quite a lot of them, though; whoever they had been in life, they were a fearsome mob in death.

“You killed off my warriors, but now you shall fight them regardless!”

I what? I shook my head in instinctive denial. I hadn’t killed anyone since I got here, and I was hoping to keep that record clean through whatever else I had to face here.

The War Witch drew back her hood. The features revealed were quite familiar to me, though twisted almost beyond recognition by sheer hatred: it was Dark Alamsta, the witch I’d faced once before just outside the Glade after Alamsta had passed her trials.

With a brief gesture that was somehow also vaguely obscene, the War Witch urged her zombie mob onward…

TO BE CONTINUED


	7. Out of the Chrysalis

There were so many zombies in the War Witch’s horde that I knew I could never defeat them all, even with the aid of the Sword, and yet, somehow, I was as calm as if I were facing down a mob of bunnies. I am the Young Protector, and I trust in the One to aid me to victory over my foes—but even if the One doesn’t, a Protector never backs down against the Enemy. I was about to declare as much when—

“BAAAAAAAAAAA!!!!!!!” As the ram let out its full-throated bleat, the wolves began to howl, and the rats and the sporks shrieked along with it. For the first time, the malevolence in Dark Alamsta’s face was replaced by surprise. Even the zombies paused in confusion.

Moments later, I realized the truth of what had happened. Everything in this forest that had breath was crying out that they were on the side of the Medallion, casting off the lures by which the War Witch had previously snared them.

Wolves and sporks fell upon the zombies with gusto, until nothing was left but the bones; then the rats charged in, practically liquefying the bones. The War Witch would see no further use from these corpses.

As the wolves and the rats encircled the War Witch, the color leached from their pelts, leaving them a pure white that was almost painful to behold, even for me. This was the Army of the One, and the Enemy simply could not prevail.

The War Witch let out a horrid cry that went from outrage to frustration and finally to despair, but before it died away, the War Witch had vanished. Briefly, I wondered whither she had fled this time, but other matters were more urgent. She would not return before my mission was complete, and that was all that mattered at the moment.

Wolves, sporks and rats had all resumed their normal coloration; without looking at me, they all sprinted away into the forest, which no longer carried the aura of death about it. The ram and I went forward along the path, resuming our trek to the Glade.

The forest was coming back to life as the ram and I passed through it: leaves were regrowing at an astounding rate; buds poked their way out from branch or earth and flung themselves open in a literal flowering; and as I went, I could hear the animal life filtering back into their accustomed places. Yes, even the sporks, though they, the wolves, the Terror Wings and even the patch of Striped Death Mold I passed gave me no fears, for the Restoration was at hand, and I was its agent.

The way to the Glade was open now; there was no trace that it had ever been closed off. I entered the Glade reverently, moving to the plaque at the base of the Tree, and as soon as I stepped within it, my sniffles, sneezes and coughs vanished as though they had never been. In place of the inscription it had held on my last visit, it read thus:

Now ’tis time for sleepers’ wake  
Go and the Medallion take  
To first of Realm and place it on  
Image branded branch anon

That was easy enough to figure out. I walked over to the head of a line of enclosures wrapped in branches. At about my eye level, there was a branch with the image of the Medallion burned into it. Given its position, I knew that this cocoon held the man I was to awaken first.

“First in war, first in peace, and first of his Realm to rise,” I said, placing the Medallion on its image on the branch. The cocoon of branches drew back, revealing Alamanast King of the Realm, Twelfth of That Name. He awoke instantly, his eyes meeting mine before glancing around the rest of the Glade; I’m sure he missed not one detail of the tableau before him.

I made to hand the king the Medallion, but he held up one hand in refusal, then pointed to the cocoon we somehow both knew held his only remaining child, Alamsta, the Heiress Apparent. I obediently released her, the king by my side, and at the king’s direction, I handed her the Medallion.

As soon as the Medallion left my hands, the familiar gray swirling mists of the journey between worlds surrounded me…

TO BE CONTINUED


	8. Living in Reality

Now, all this began with a truly bizarre dream that I wasn’t sure hadn’t been a dream, so I tried to prepare myself for whatever insanity awaited me in “reality”, whether Bob the penguin showed up to aid me or not. While I had been in the Realm, I had been wearing normal clothes, though the dream had me wearing a wet-suit so that I could do acrobatics while reciting the Gettysburg Address.

The world wobbled back into place around me as the Coin came slowly to a stop. I was back in my room at home, in my pajamas, but around my waist was the fur and gold sporran that I had been wearing over my wet-suit in the dream; it shone with jewels even in my dim night-light. There was nothing inside it however, and I distinctly remember putting the steno pad on which the Invisible Man had made me take down his meanderings about entropy and the like into its pouch for safekeeping.

Before I could get too worked up over why I still (again?) had the sporran, I was seized by a coughing fit of epic proportions; it was as though all the phlegm that had been held at bay while I was in the Glade was trying to reassert itself as quickly as possible. I coughed, sneezed and sniffled for quite a while; fortunately, this was my room in my home, so I had plenty of tissues to hand, since my handkerchief had gone missing somewhere in the Realm. Given its condition when I last recall noticing it, it wouldn’t have been of much use anyway.

When my breathing had been restored enough that I could spare thought for anything else again, I started mulling over and writing down what had happened in the dream, but it was just so odd that I kept stopping mid-sentence to gawk in disbelief at what I had written, which was merely what I’d experienced. I must have been sicker than I’d thought, because, as you’ve already read, it was one mighty fever dream.

Honestly, what had happened in the Realm seemed rather straightforward and pedestrian compared to the dream, though the bruises left by the beating the Scowrers gave me were pretty painful for quite some time. I passed them off by telling my parents I’d accidentally wandered into a street fight that afternoon and managed to block all but the body blows directed at me on my way out of it, and they sort-of bought it. Anyway, I wasn’t thinking about the happenings in the Realm at all right after I came back from it, just because it seemed fairly mundane. Yes, even the zombies.

“Hey, dude.” Bob was back. “Don’t fret about what went on in the dream overmuch. It won’t really matter for now, but what you did in the Realm will. That part was real enough. Oh,” the penguin pulled a steno pad from behind his back. “Here’s your notes back. They might be useful eventually, but not until much further down the line. See you, dude!” Bob clacked his beak twice and vanished.

I was suddenly so completely and thoroughly exhausted that I climbed back into bed without even taking the sporran off. I fell asleep as soon as I was prone, and didn’t wake up for almost two days; they told me later that I’d actually had “walking pneumonia”, so weird fever dreams and such were par for the course.

I still trust Bob the purple penguin, though, so I’ll be on the watch for consequences from defeating the Scowrers and their War Witch when next I visit the Realm.

THUS ENDS

Wandering

Being the Fifth Tale of the Coin, the Sword and the Medallion

THE STORY CONTINUES WITH

Giants & Centaurs & Snares... Oh, My!

Being the Sixth Tale of the Coin, the Sword and the Medallion


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